ABOUT THIS BOOK

In A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten, award-winning author, sex educator, filmmaker, and podcast host Tristan Taormino shares her coming-of-age story, revealing how her radical sexuality and unconventional career grew out of an extraordinary queer father-daughter relationship. Raised by a hard-working single mother on Long Island, Tristan got her sex ed from the 1980s TV show Solid Gold and The Joy of Sex. She spent summers at drag shows in Provincetown with her father, Bill, who had come out as gay in the mid-1970s. Her sexual identity bloomed during her college years at Wesleyan University, where she discovered her desire for butches and kinky sex.

Tristan’s world began to fall apart when her dad was diagnosed with AIDS. After a series of devastating events, she moved to the messy, glorious world of 1990s New York City. In the midst of grief and depression, she helped change queer sexual subculture with her zine Pucker Up, her infamous The Village Voice column, and her editorship of legendary lesbian porn magazine On Our Backs. After the publication of her first book, The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women, Tristan followed her own path that marked the beginning of her work as a trailblazing feminist pornographer.

After a lifetime of outrageous adventures, Tristan reflects on the bonds, loss, and mental-health struggles that shaped her. She weaves together history from her father’s unpublished memoir, exploring the surprising ways their personal patterns converge and diverge. Bracingly emotional and erotically charged, A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten reveals the transformative power of queer pleasure and defiance.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Tristan Taormino is a writer, speaker, sex educator, and host of the podcast Sex Out Loud. A former syndicated columnist for The Village Voice, she is the author of numerous books, including Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships, Down and Dirty Sex Secrets, and The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women. She is the founding editor of the annual Best Lesbian Erotica anthologies, editor of The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play, and the Erotic Edge, and coeditor of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure. Taormino has won four Lambda Literary Awards and eight Feminist Porn Awards, among other awards. She lives in Los Angeles.

REVIEWS

“How fortunate we are to have such a passionate and skillful writer who has chosen to share with us her many wonderful and varied romantic relationships and sexual encounters, and the wisdom she’s accrued in the process. This is such a fun read!”

-- Kate Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us

“Tristan Taormino’s memoir is unabashedly, in-your-face, all-caps QUEER in the best way humanly possible. A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten is honest, vulnerable, wise, and at parts, heartbreaking. But there is strength amidst the heartbreak, and Taormino’s message of queer acceptance and living without shame always shines through.”

-- Zachary Zane, author of Boyslut: A Memoir and Manifesto

“A stunningly beautiful memoir spilling the tea on coming-of-age queerness, pathos, and the pleasure of the century’s end. It’s my perfect time capsule and this is the perfect book.”

-- Margaret Cho

"With personal images, sincere prose, and powerfully intimate excerpts from her father’s unpublished memoir, Taormino’s text very much orbits around her relationship with her father. The woman emerging from the grief has become a powerful, inspirational, unapologetic sex educator and creative dynamo. A passionate memoir packed with emotional punch and enlightening glimpses of personal liberation."

-- Kirkus Reviews

"Taormino offers both a stirring tribute to her father and a moving acknowledgement that she 'came of age in a time of more visibility and acceptance than he could have imagined.' . . . Open-minded readers will love this no-holds-barred portrait of family ties and personal liberation."

-- Publishers Weekly

"A Part Of The Heart Can’t Be Eaten is an entertaining and important historical document and what makes Taormino’s story especially interesting is that she hails from the days before the internet took over. Her heyday was the 1990s, a time when sexual exploration could still be underground, so it had time to mature."

-- Stephanie Theobald Daily Beast

"A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten is a captivating romp through Taormino’s life. . . . This striking portrait of a bold, self-identified femme dyke is intimate, wise, and uncompromising. Taormino offers a kinky sex scene for every emotional gut-punch, sealing her place as a crucial voice in sex and a sharp narrator of both personal and political queer history."

-- Ro White them

"With candor and clarity, Taormino writes about the journey to becoming a culture-shaping writer and thinker, sparing seemingly few details regarding sexual experiences that defined her, her days at Wesleyan, her femme identity, and her early work. It is often bluntly funny ('Writing and anal sex were my passions'), as well as highly sensitive, particularly in Taormino’s recounting of her experiences with depression, with which she was diagnosed in 1993, and her relationship with her gay father."

-- Rich Juzwiak Jezebel

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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